“Thanks for Your Input. We Will Get Back to You Shortly.” How to Design Automated Feedback in Location-Based Citizen Participation Systems Andreas Sackl, Sarah-Kristin Thiel, Peter Fröhlich and Manfred Tscheligi Abstract Location-based citizen participation systems have so far mostly been char- acterized by mediated human-to-human communication between citizens, authori- ties and other stakeholders. However, in the near future we will see more autom- atized feedback elements, which inform citizens about the expectable financial or legal implications of their requests. We conducted an experiment to provide research- driven guidance for interaction design in this application context. Thirty partici- pants submitted tree planting proposals with an experimental prototype that varied along the dimensions immediacy, implicitness, and precision. They rated the differ- ent forms of provided automatic feedback with regard to satisfaction, and they ranked them in a subsequent card sorting trial. The results show that users have consider- ably high expectations towards the immediacy and precision of automated feedback, regardless of the inherently higher responsiveness compared to human-operated par- ticipation systems. With regard to interaction design, results indicate that the auto- matically processed information should be made available as early and as possible to users. 1 Introduction The research field “smart cities” investigates various aspects of modern urban sys- tems to provide profound solutions for actual and upcoming issues and challenges like sustainable energy generation and consumption, mobility concepts. The integra- tion of citizen in urban development processes is one of the key challenges in this A. Sackl ( ✉ ) ⋅ S.-K. Thiel ⋅ P. Fröhlich ⋅ M. Tscheligi AIT, Giefinggasse 2, Vienna, Austria e-mail: andreas.sackl@ait.ac.at S.-K. Thiel e-mail: sarah.kristin.thiel@gmail.com P. Fröhlich e-mail: peter.froehlich@ait.ac.at M. Tscheligi e-mail: manfred.tscheligi@ait.ac.at © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 P. Kiefer et al. (eds.), Progress in Location Based Services 2018, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71470-7_13 257